1. Technical Field
This invention relates to the field of accessing information via an audio interface over a communications network, and more particularly, to voice-enabling visual content.
2. Description of the Related Art
A significant amount of the content available over the Internet is visual in nature. For example, text documents, and more significantly, visual markup language documents such as Hypertext Markup language (HTML) documents are accessed through visual browsers. Users desiring access to Internet content when traveling or when away from a stationary computer system typically access content through Internet-enabled portable communications devices having a visual display. The displays on such portable communications devices, however, traditionally are very small. In consequence, viewing and interacting with visual content as displayed on a portable communications device can be troublesome.
Recently, developers have embraced audio interfaces as a viable alternative to visual displays in portable communications devices. An audio interface typically requires less space to implement within a device than a visual display. Additionally, audio interfaces provide a natural interface through which inexperienced computer users as well as physically challenged users can interact.
The shift toward audio interfaces has lead to increased efforts to provide audio content in a format suitable for presentation through an audio interface. Audio content often is generated by content providers and/or service providers either by creating new audio content or by converting existing visual content to a format suitable for use with an audio interface. For example, content providers can generate Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) document versions of HTML documents. This process can be performed manually or can be performed automatically using a transcoding tool such as WebSphere® Transcoding Publisher available from International Business Machines Corporation of Armonk, New York.
Although service or content providers may attempt to account for user preferences, users do not have the capability to select with particularity the content that should be available in an audio format. Moreover, determinations as to the type of audio content that will be made available frequently are unilateral on the part of service or content providers. As the user can access only that audio content which the service provider has chosen to make available to its subscribing users, users are limited to a small subset of the visual content that is presently available over the Internet. Thus, if a particular content provider does not offer audio versions of particular Web pages, users may be forced to acquire audio content from a source different from that which the user typically obtains trusted visual content.